Abstract

A new finite difference scheme, the development of the finite difference heterogeneous multiscale method (FDHMM), is constructed for simulating saturated water flow in random porous media. In the discretization framework of FDHMM, we follow some ideas from the multiscale finite element method and construct basic microscopic elliptic models. Tests on a variety of numerical experiments show that, in the case that only about a half of the information of the whole microstructure is used, the constructed scheme gives better accuracy at a much lower computational time than FDHMM for the problem of aquifer response to sudden change in reservoir level and gives comparable accuracy at a much lower computational time than FDHMM for the weak drawdown problem.